[PopsiclePete]

We can't prove that. It feels good to believe it, sure, but it's also possible that precisely zero people working in sweatshops have ever had Einstein's talent.

Sure, it's easy to say - take away the sweatshops, provide them with UBI and voila - suddenly we have 5000 Einsteins on our hands.

But it's also possible we'll still have zero. It's not like we don't have millions of people leading "cushy" (by comparison lives) in the West already, yet - no more Einsteins?

[KaoruAoiShiho]

Why specifically Einstein... 5000 cushy people isn't likely to produce an Einstein but could easily produce some great artist or engineer or other researcher.

Anyway about Einstein you need to think about how many physicists existed at his time that had the education to even work on a theory of relativity. It's probably about 5 thousand. Think about it in terms of sports, someone who is a 1 in 5000 talent probably wouldn't even make it onto a college sports team, but that's because sports is something we as a society support tremendously. Someone like Michael Jordan is 1 out of 10 million, cut down the overall population to 5000 and it's like celebrating the "genius" of a district middle school star.

[Imnimo]

It seems like we'd have to have been extremely lucky for the one Einstein to have been born where he was and not as a subsistence farmer if there were zero potential Einsteins among the subsistence farmer population.

[PopsiclePete]

We were extremely lucky, yes. Not to mention he was Jewish and being born, say, even just 15 years later than he was, could've meant he'd have ended up in concentration camp and we'd still have no theory of relativity. That's quite possible.